Orlando

  ‘Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!’ she cried, standing by the oak tree.

  The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel-blue feather. She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow-falling arrow that cleaves the deep air beautifully. He was coming, as he always came, in moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the moon was on the waters, and nothing moved between sky and sea. Then he came.

  All was still now. It was near midnight. The moon rose slowly over the weald. Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen. Gazing below her, Orlando saw dark plumes tossing in the courtyard, and torches flickering and shadows kneeling. A Queen once more stepped from her chariot.

  ‘The house is at your service, Ma’am’ she cried, curtseying deeply. ‘Nothing has been changed. The dead Lord, my father, shall lead you in.’

  As she spoke, the first stroke of midnight sounded. The cold breeze of the present brushed her face with its little breath of fear. She looked anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane39 coming nearer and nearer.

  ‘Here! Shel, here!’ she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness.

  And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea-captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.

  ‘It is the goose!’ Orlando cried. ‘The wild goose …’

  And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.

  Index

  A., Lord, 135

  Abbey, Westminster, 39

  Addison, Joseph, 119, 138, 145

  Alexandra, Queen, 55

  Anne, Queen, 136

  Archduchess Harriet of Finster-Aarhorn (see Archduke Harry), 77, 126–8

  Archduke, Harry, the, 169

  Arlington House, 137

  Bartholomew, Widow, 161, 162, 165

  Bartolus, Captain Nicholas Benedict, 109, 115, 138

  Basket, Butler, 163

  Boswell, James, 154

  Brigge, John Fenner, 90, 94

  Browne, Sir Thomas, 51, 54, 57

  Browning, Robert, 193

  C, Marquis of, 135, 169

  Canute, the elk-hound, 169

  Carlyle, Thomas, 193

  Carpenter, Nurse, 50

  Charles the Second, King, 83

  Chesterfield, Lady, 134

  Chesterfield, Lord, 148, 201

  Chubb, Eusebius, 158

  Cicero, 71

  Clorinda, 23

  Consort, the Prince, 208

  Cumberland, Earl of, 21, 208

  Deffand, Madame du, 139

  Donne, John, 62, 198

  Drake, 226

  Dryden, John, 119, 138, 219

  Dupper, Mr., 49, 53, 58, 120, 121, 181

  Elizabeth, Queen, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 69

  Euphrosyne, 23

  Favilla, 23

  Field, Mrs., 50

  Frost, the Great, 24

  Gladstone, Mrs., 177

  Greene, Nicholas (afterwards Sir), 58–65, 71, 192, 225

  Greenwich, 60

  Grimsditch, Mrs., 49, 51, 53, 74, 120, 121, 208

  Gulliver’s Travels, 146

  Gwynn, Nell, 83

  Hall, the falconer, 53

  Hartopp, Miss Penelope, 91

  Hercules, Death of, tragedy by Orlando, 65

  Isham, Mr., 58

  James the First, King, 24, 47, 69

  Johnson, Samuel, 154

  Jonson, Ben, 62

  Kew Gardens, 203

  Keynes, Mrs. J. M. (see Lopokova, Madame)

  Leicester Square, 150

  Lock, Rape of the, 145

  Lopokova, Madame, 217

  Louise, 208

  M., Mr., 135, 169

  Marlowe, 61, 62

  Marshall & Snelgrove’s, 207

  Mary, Queen of Scots, 122

  Melbourne, Lord, 166

  Moray, the Earl of, 27

  Nell, 151

  Nelson, 226

  Oak Tree, The, 54, 189, 192, 195, 215, 224

  Orlando, appearance as a boy, 12; writes his first play, 13; visits Queen at Whitehall, 18; made Treasurer and Steward, 18; his loves, 19; and Russian Princess, 26–46; his first trance, 47; retires into solitude, 49; love of reading, 52; his romantic dramas, literary ambitions, 54, 57, 58, 70, 71, 72; and Greene, 59, 63, 65; his great-grandmother Moll, 60; buys elk-hounds, 66; and his poem The Oak Tree, 67, 77, 102, 122, 163; and his house, 73–6; and the Archduchess Harriet, 77–81; Ambassador at Constantinople, 82–99; created a Duke, 90; second trance, 94; marriage to Rosina Pepita, a gipsy, 94; becomes a woman, 97; with the gipsies, 99–107; returns to England, 108; lawsuits, 119; and Archduke Harry, 126; in London society, 133; entertains the wits, 144; and Mr. Pope, 148; and Nell, 151; confused with her cousin, 153; returns to her country house, 161; breaks her ankle, 170; declared a woman, 176; engagement, 174; marriage, 181; birth of her first son, 204

  Othello, 41

  Palmerston, Lord, 187

  Pippin, the spaniel, 136

  Pope, Alexander, 119, 138, 141, 142, 147, 149, 219

  Princess, the Russian, 27–30, 36, 39, 55, 116, 124, 209

  R., Countess of, 138, 139

  R., Lady, 141, 191

  Railway, the, 190

  Robinson, Grace, 50

  Rossetti, Miss Christina, 201

  Rustum el Sadi, 102, 104, 124, 226

  St. Paul’s, 38, 39

  Salisbury, Lady, 134

  Scrope, Sir Adrian, 90, 92, 93

  Shakespeare, William, 16, 56, 215

  Shelmerdine, Marmaduke Bonthrop, 174, 227, 228

  Smiles, 198

  Spectator, the, 146

  Spenser, 197

  Stewkley, Mrs., 16, 50

  Stubbs, Joe, 220

  Suffolk, Lady, 134

  Swift, Jonathan, 219

  Tavistock, Lady, 134

  Tennyson, the late Lord, 144, 193

  Tupper, 198

  Tyrconnel, the Lady Margaret, 29

  Vere, Lord Francis, 27

  Victoria, Queen, 163, 166, 177

  Williams, Mrs., 154

  Wren, Christopher, 149

  THE END

  Notes

  GENERAL NOTE

  Orlando is a roman à clef, written to entertain and also perhaps to comfort Vita Sackville-West. It is full of knowing detail about Knole, the Sackvilles’ ancestral home near Sevenoaks where Vita had grown up and from which she was finally exiled when her father died in January 1928, during the writing of Orlando. Part of Woolf’s intention was the re-creation, within the novel, of the home that Vita had lost, and much of the information she used was drawn from Vita’s account of it in Knole. But Woolf had also visited Knole, and had listened attentively to Vita talking about her love for it. For that reason, these notes also draw on Vita’s expanded fourth edition of Knole (1958) as well as on Charles J. Phillips’s two-volume History of the Sackville Family (1930) (hereafter, Phillips) which also provides a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and drawings in the house at that time. In writing Orlando, Virginia accepted Vita’s view of the Sackvilles that ‘their inter est lay in their being so representative. From generation to generation they might stand, fully equipped, as portraits from English history’ (Knole, p. 28).

  In what follows, further material has been taken from Woolf’s own Letters and Diary, from Victoria Glendinning’s biography, Vita (1983), and from the Letters
of Vita. On the MS, see ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’ (ed. Madeline Moore, Twentieth Century Literature, 25, 1979, PP. 303–55). Much the most important single source of information has been Nigel Nicolson, who annotated a volume of Orlando for our text editor, Brenda Lyons, especially for this edition; we would like to thank him particularly warmly for all his help. In addition, Sandra Gilbert would like to express her deep gratitude to Susan Fox for invaluable research assistance.

  PREFACE

  The list of contributors in the preface, which includes many of Woolf’s favourite authors, as well as her friends, is part of the joke begun when she subtitled Orlando, ‘A Biography’ (see Letters, III, pp. 493, 547, 554, where she asks her nephew Quentin Bell, Hugh Walpole and Charles Sanger for permission to use their names here).

  CHAPTER I

  1. a Moor: a North African. It is difficult to know in what context Orlando’s actual ancestors would have fought against Moors in North Africa, though his literary ancestor, Charlemagne’s knight, Roland or Orlando, the hero of Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (1532), had fought against them and been driven mad by love (see the introduction, p. xxv). According to the MS, the novel’s action begins in 1553 when Thomas Sackville, like Orlando, would have been sixteen; the time sequence quickly moves on to the end of Elizabeth’s reign (which began in 1558).

  2. fields of asphodel: where the immortals or the happy dead live. The asphodel is a lily-like flower – Vita had found it growing wild in Persia on her visit in 1926 (Vita, p. 157).

  3. northern mists… coronets on their heads: ‘The Sackvilles are supposed to have gone into Normandy in the ninth century with Rollo the Dane’ (Knole, p. 29).

  4. an heraldic leopard: mentioned as decorating the Tudor gables (Knole, pp. 2, 3).

  5. the shapely legs, the handsome body: what follows, according to Nicolson, is a recognizable description of Vita Sackville-West, even down to the detail that she ‘was a trifle clumsy’ (p. 13). Woolf, like the book’s narrator, wrote admiringly of Vita’s legs (e.g. to Jacques Raverat, 26 December 1924, as ‘her real claim to consideration’, Letters, III, p. 150; or in her diary a year later, Diary, III, 21 December 1925, p. 52).

  6. Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts: like Orlando, Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, wrote a five-act tragedy inspired by early English history, Gorboduc, performed in 1561 (Knole, pp. 33, 41).

  7. Stubbs, the gardener: Stubbs was the name of the head gardener at Knole when Woolf was writing (Nicolson).

  8. the house was a town: Woolf exaggerates Vita’s descriptions of Knole as ‘a medieval village’, ‘a jumbled village’, just as below (p. 16) where Knole’s four acres become five (Knole, pp. 1, 18).

  9. a place crowned by a single oak tree: Vita often wrote under an oak in Knole park, on a high mound known as the Mast Head (Nicolson). The oak tree, traditionally associated with English kings, later provides the title for Orlando’s major poem, his equivalent of Vita’s prize-winning poem The Land. Its title suggests the value of roots, family and Englishness.

  10. Sometimes one could see the English Channel… London… Snowdon: none of these places can actually be seen from Knole, but this panoramic sweep (echoed in the novel’s time scheme) seems to have been part of her plan for the book from its first conception: ‘Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called “The Jessamy Brides”… Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house — one can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes… The Ladies are to have Con stantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes…’ (Diary, III, 14 March 1927, p. 131).

  11. Mrs. Stewkley’s sitting-room… hodden brown: a ‘Mrs Stewkly’ is named as ‘At the parlour table’ in a list of Knole household servants from 1613 (Knole, p. 78); hodden is a coarse woollen cloth; the unidentified writer is William Shakespeare, whose portrait was in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole. Vita later wrote, ‘I often entertained wild dreams that some light might be thrown on the Shakespeare problem by a discovery of letters or documents at Knole’ (Knole, 4th edn, 1958, p. 57).

  Woolf had associated Shakespeare at work with the mystery of creativity in her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’: ‘A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so – A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door…’ (Shorter Fiction, p. 85.)

  12. the great Queen herself: Queen Elizabeth gave Knole to Thomas Sackville in 1566, and visited the house on a royal progress in 1573. There was a portrait of her in the Brown Gallery (Phillips, I, p. 190; II, p. 423). Woolf’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth was partly in spired by her waxwork effigy, then at Westminster Abbey, of which she wrote a description soon after completing Orlando: ‘Her eyes are wide and vigilant; her nose thin as the beak of a hawk; her lips shut tight; her eyebrows arched; only the jowl gives the finedrawn face its massiveness’ (New Republic, 11 April 1928; reprinted in ‘The Fleeting Portrait’, CE, IV, p. 205). Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey drew a comparable portrait of the ageing queen in his Elizabeth and Essex (published December 1928), but Woolf did not apparently read it until after the publication of Orlando in October (see Diary, III, 25 November 1928, p. 208).

  13. she heard the guns in the Channel: Vita had told Virginia of hearing the guns in France from Knole during the First World War (Nicolson). Woolf had herself heard them on the downs at Asheham in 1916 (see ‘Heard on the Downs’, Essays, II, pp. 40–42).

  14. the great monastic house: Knole had passed from Archbishop Bourchier and Cardinal Morton to Henry VIII, and thence to Queen Elizabeth who gave it to Thomas Sackville. Although the unnamed house in Orlando is said to have been given to Orlando’s father, Orlando himself is also identified with Thomas Sackville, both as a poet and playwright (Sackville had written Gorboduc and the moralistic poem A Mirror for Magistrates), as the Queen’s ‘young cousin’, and in receiving various honours from her. Like Sackville, Orlando be comes Lord Treasurer and Lord High Steward, is dubbed Knight of the Garter (see p. 18), and is sent to Scotland ‘on a sad embassy to the unhappy Queen’ (p. 18), i.e. to warn Mary Queen of Scots of her impending execution (Knole, pp. 34–5).

  15. booming at the Tower: i.e. at the Tower of London, to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

  16. Richmond: Queen Eli2abeth lived at Richmond Palace, to the south-west of London, dying there in 1603. She was succeeded by James I.

  17. Doris, Chloris, Delia, or Diana: these might be typical names of mistresses in love poems: the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel wrote a sonnet sequence to Delia; while the Restoration poet Charles Sackville, sixth Earl (1638–1706), ‘left us gay and artificial stanzas to Chloris and Dorinda’ (Knole, p. 115).

  18. Wapping Old Stairs: in east London, near the Tower and running down to the docks. Woolf’s fascination with Elizabethan voyages is evident in what follows: the Spanish main was the north-east coast of South America, from Panama to the Orinoco River; the Azores are islands off the coast of Portugal, where in 1591, the explorer Sir Richard Grenville’s ship Revenge was sunk as he fought against the Spanish. (Her essay on Hakluyt’s Voyages, ‘Trafficks and Discoveries’, is reprinted in Essays, II, pp. 329–36.)

  19. Earl of Cumberland: ‘a picturesque figure. He was Elizabeth’s official champion at all jousts and tilting, a nobleman of great splendour… [he had] the love of adventure which carried him eleven times to sea, to the Indies and elsewhere’ (Knole, pp. 48–9). He was the father-in-law of Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, and there was a portrait of him in the Brown Gallery (Phillips, p. 423). The reference to Cumberland building almshouses in the Sheen Road later in this paragraph looks like a private joke. On 27 August 1932, Woolf dictated the following response to an inquiry on this topic:

  [Mrs Woolf] cannot recollect that she had any authority for saying that Lord Cumberland founded almshouses; she thinks it probable that having some recollect
ion of old almshouses in that neighbourhood, she fathered them upon Lord Cumberland on the spur of the moment.

  These early nineteenth century almshouses stood just around the corner from Hogarth House, Richmond, where the Woolfs lived from 1915–24. There is a further reference to them near the end of the novel (p. 208).

  20. Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne: Nigel Nicolson identifies Clorinda with Rosamund Grosvenor, Vita’s first, and at one time best-loved, friend (Vita, pp. 23–4, 48). Euphrosyne (‘joy’) was one of the three classical Graces (Woolf had used the name for the boat in her first novel, The Voyage Out, 1915). As ‘one of the Irish Desmonds’, she may recall the portrait in the Leicester Gallery of Catherine Fitzger ald, Countess of Desmond (Knole, p. 14).

  21. The Great Frost: occurred in January 1608. Woolf knew of it from Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet ‘The Great Frost/Cold Doings in London, except it be at the Lottery’, reprinted anonymously in Edward Arber’s An English Garner (I, 1877, pp. 77–99). Some details are taken from his pamphlet, e.g. ‘the high mortality among sheep and cattle’, but Woolfs account is more fantastic, so that the rocks of the Peak District (‘some parts of Derbyshire’) are attributed to ‘a kind of petrification’. Dekker described how the Thames became ‘a very pavement of glass’, and the citizens played games and sold food and drink on the frozen river; he also described the plight of a man trapped on an ice floe as the result of the sudden thaw with which the frost ended. Woolf had a letter from Vita of 31 January 1927 describing Moscow and ‘all the traffic passing to and fro across the frozen river as though it were a road; and sleighs every where…’(Letters of Vita, p. 183.)